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Half the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't want to do harm-but the harm does not interest them... or they do not see it... because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves [or look well in the eyes of others].

As most people know, the Indian city of Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) was rocked this week by just the latest in a recent string of terrorist attacks which have become increasingly more deadly. Mark Steyn wrote about it yesterday.

The Islamic imperialist project is a totalitarian ideology: It is at war with Hindus, Jews, Americans, Britons, everything that is other.

In the 10 months before this atrocity, Muslim terrorists killed more than 200 people in India, and no one paid much attention. Just business as usual, alas. In Mumbai the perpetrators were cannier. They launched a multiple indiscriminate assault on soft targets, and then in the confusion began singling out A-list prey: Not just wealthy Western tourists, but local orthodox Jews, and municipal law enforcement. They drew prominent officials to selected sites, and then gunned down the head of the antiterrorism squad and two of his most senior lieutenants. They attacked a hospital, the place you're supposed to take the victims to, thereby destabilizing the city's emergency-response system.

And, aside from dozens of corpses, they were rewarded with instant, tangible, economic damage to India: the Bombay Stock Exchange was still closed Friday...

What's relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets, and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin's New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan's deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you'll find local lads and wily outsiders: That's pretty much a given.

But we're in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology....The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It's not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That's what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the central Asian 'stans to Yorkshire, and co-opted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad....There was a photograph that appeared in many of the British papers, taken by a Reuters man and captioned by the news agency as follows: "A suspected gunman walks outside the premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or Victoria Terminus railway station." The photo of the "suspected gunman" showed a man holding a gun. We don't know much about him – he might be Muslim or Episcopalian, he might be an impoverished uneducated victim of Western colonialist economic oppression or a former vice-president of Lehman Brothers embarking on an exciting midlife career change – but one thing we ought to be able to say for certain is that a man pointing a gun is not a "suspected gunman" but a gunman. "This kind of silly political correctness infects reporters and news services worldwide," wrote John Hinderaker of Powerline. "They think they're being scrupulous – the man hasn't been convicted of being a gunman yet! – when, in fact, they're just being foolish. But the irrational conviction that nothing can be known unless it has been determined by a court and jury isn't just silly, it's dangerous."

Just so. This isn't law enforcement but an ideological assault – and we're fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology's advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population's demographic advance among everybody else.

So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don't seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven't yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn't about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It's bigger than that. And if you don't have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you'll lose.

A worker was killed in the crush Friday after a throng of shoppers eager for post-Thanksgiving bargains burst through the doors at a suburban Wal-Mart, authorities said...."He was bum-rushed by 200 people," co-worker Jimmy Overby, 43, told the Daily News. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too. ... I literally had to fight people off my back."...Witnesses told the Daily News that before the store was closed, eager shoppers streamed past emergency crews as they worked furiously to save the worker's life.

"The greatest evil is not done now in those sordid 'dens of rime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices [and classrooms], by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice."

Western liberal elites have recently become increasingly prone to apologizing for the excesses of their white, "Christian" predecessors. Of course, most of them haven't the faintest idea for what they are apologizing, nor is there any particular point to such confessions, but it does allow the contrite person "to consider himself the moral superior of his predecessors," as Theodore Dalrymple said recently in a column about FAS (False Apology Syndrome). He continued:

On the other hand, he knows full well that he has absolutely no personal moral responsibility for whatever it is that he is apologizing for. In other words, his apology brings him all kudos and no pain.

This inevitably leads to the false supposition that the moral life can be lived without the pain of self-examination. The locus of moral concern becomes what others do or have done, not what one does oneself. And a good deed in the form of an apology in public for some heinous wrong in the distant past gives the person who makes it a kind of moral capital, at least in his own estimation, against which he can offset his expenditure of vice.

The habit of public apology for things for which one bears no personal responsibility changes the whole concept of a virtuous person, from one who exercises the discipline of virtue to one who expresses correct sentiment. The most virtuous person of all is he who expresses it loudest and to most people. This is a debasement of morality, not a refinement of it. The end result is likely to be self-satisfaction and ruthlessness accompanied by unctuous moralizing, rather than a determination to behave well.

The effect on some of the recipients of such apologies is likely to be very bad also, for similar though slightly different reasons. Let us take the demand for an apology for the Atlantic slave trade as an example.

I doubt whether anyone could be found nowadays who would mount a moral defense of that trade. That it was hideous and cruel beyond all description hardly needs saying...

[T]he supply of slaves depended crucially on the co-operation of African suppliers who captured slaves for sale. No apology from their descendents is required. The trade was abolished almost entirely through the efforts of white abolitionists. However discontented with their lot present-day American descendents of slaves may be, they are much better off than they would have been had their ancestors not been brought to America. Are they morally obliged, then, to offer up thanks to the slave traders who brought their ancestors to America?

Thus the demand for an apology for the Atlantic slave trade is a demand that people with no personal responsibility for it apologize to people who have suffered no personal wrong from it. From the point of view of morality, this is a very strange demand.

It isn’t very difficult to discern what lies behind it: money, and lots of it. Nor does it require extraordinary powers of prediction or foresight to know who would get the lion’s share of any such money that was forthcoming.

But even when money is not involved, there are deleterious effects on the recipients of what one might call class-action apologies. Just as those who give them become convinced of their own virtue, so do those who receive them. It is enough that they should be considered victims for them to conclude that they can do no wrong, or at any rate no wrong worth talking about. For what is a personal peccadillo to set beside a great historical wrong?

An apology of this kind, then, or even the supposition that such an apology ought to be forthcoming, exerts a liberating, that is to say loosening, effect upon personal morals. For what can I do wrong to compare with the wrongs that my ancestors suffered at the hands of your ancestors? How dare you even mention it, you hypocrite!

The neat division of populations into victims and perpetrators, oppressed and oppressors, sinners and saints, that public apologies for long-past wrongs both imply and strengthen means that all sense of human tragedy is lost. The situation of the Aborigines in Australia, however, was and is tragic, and would still be tragic even had the settlers behaved from the first in the best possible or morally ideal fashion. ...But a blanket apology and the granting of group economic privileges is hardly the way to cultivate a sense of personal responsibility in a population now decimated by alcoholism and brutalized by family violence. Quite the contrary: psychologically, if not in strict logic, it will allow a man to beat his wife and blame history.

The False Apology Syndrome flourishes wherever there has been a shift in the traditional locus of moral concern. At one time, a man probably felt most morally responsible for his own actions. He was adjudged (and judged himself) good or bad by how he conducted himself toward those in his immediate circle. From its center rippled circles of ever-decreasing moral concern, of which he was also increasingly ignorant. Now, however, it is the other way round. Under the influence of the media of mass communication and the spread of sociological ways of thinking, a man is most likely to judge himself and others by the opinions he and they hold on political, social, and economic questions that are far distant from his immediate circle. A man may be an irresponsible father, but that is more than compensated for by his deep concern about global warming, or foreign policy, or the food situation in Africa.

A false apology is usually accompanied by bogus or insincere guilt, which is often confused with appropriate shame. ...Guilt, by its very nature, ought to be connected to responsibility; it ought, moreover, to be in proportion to the wrongdoing that is its occasion. To assume a guilt greater than the responsibility warrants is actually a form of grandiosity or self-aggrandisement. The psychological mechanism seems to be something like this: “I feel very guilty, therefore I must be very important.”

In some case, it is a substitute for importance, or for a loss of importance. Europe (or at least its intellectual class) now feels more than ever responsible for Africa, precisely because its power over it has waned. If Europe cannot feel itself responsible any longer for all that is good and progressive in Africa, such as modern medicine, roads, railways, telephone, etc., it can at least feel responsible for all that is bad in it, such as starvation, civil wars, and so forth. For it is far better, from the point of view of self-esteem, to be responsible for great evil than to be completely or even relatively unimportant. If in the process of false apologizing the participants render Africans themselves inert and inanimate, responsible themselves for nothing, or nothing very much, that is a small price to pay.

False Apology Syndrome — which is not yet found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association or the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases, tenth edition — is a therefore rich but poisonous mixture of self-importance, libertinism, condescension, bad faith, loose thinking, and indifference to the effects it has on those who are apologized to.

For those who missed the college football game of the week last night on ABC, you missed a shellacking. My Crimson and Cream boys made those Red Raiders want to leave at halftime. Now, will the pollsters be impressed enough to jump the Sooners ahead of the Longhorns? We'll know in a few hours.

This story has stayed under the radar, but two days ago the Christian matchmaking website E-Harmony settled a lawsuit against them and agreed to begin matching homosexuals. It is a shame that people can use civil lawsuits to bully and oppress Christianity. It's only the beginning though; it's bound to get much worse.

The fundamental problem in the evangelical word is not inadequate technique, insufficient organization, or antiquated music, and those who want to squander the church’s resources bandaging these scratches will do nothing to staunch the flow of blood that is spilling from its true wounds. The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, his grace is too ordinary, his judgment is too benign, his gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common.

I don't quite recall what sparked this thought in my head last week, but something occurred to me regarding the current narcissistic fad within the American Church which wants to continually question why there is HUMAN suffering in the world (notwithstanding the fact that the majority of "suffering" in the Western world is quite mild). The question usually goes like this: if God is so powerful and loves people so much, then why does He allow evil to exist when He could just wipe it out with a word? Or, taking that thought one step further, why did He even allow evil to come into being, since He has always been a sovereign God? Why didn't he just throw Satan in hell as soon as he rebelled? Perhaps He just doesn't care about human suffering, at least in comparison to His glory and honor.

Which leads me to my thought... God is not a detached supernatural being that doesn't fully understand human suffering. He has suffered as much or more than any person: He died on the cross. Sometimes we subconsciously forget that Jesus was God and that when He suffered and died on the cross, God suffered and died on the cross (that's not to say that God died, since two-thirds of the Trinity did not). And when Jesus the Son was suffering, God the Father's heart was breaking in sorrow. This is one place where the doctrine of the Trinity is so key; if the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all separate beings instead of One, then that could mean that the Father was punishing the Son while staying detached from the suffering of the Son. But since they are One, He must have felt the spiritual torture (and perhaps the physical suffering as well) which the Son was experiencing by being forsaken by the Father.

So God acutely knows what suffering is like, but since He IS all-powerful and all-wise, one would think that He would have chosen to avoid that suffering with a different plan. Yet, He chose to endure the cross and the shame of death "for the joy set before Him" of glorifying Himself, the Father, and us. He is not a God who knows not suffering.

As a perfect bookend to my recent post on liberal intolerance, Theodore Dalrymple wrote a short piece yesterday on the difference between conservatives and liberals as it pertains to manners and behavior.

The Sunday before the American election, the Observer in London published an assessment of President Bush’s legacy by several well-known American writers. One of them, Tobias Wolff, wrote: “When I see someone being rude to a waiter, or blocking the road in a Ford Expedition, or yakking loudly on a cell phone in a crowded elevator, I naturally assume they voted for George W. Bush.”

Now, President Bush’s credentials as a conservative might well be questioned; but I take it nevertheless that he was elected preponderantly by conservative voters. Is there, in fact, a connection between being a conservative and having the selfish thoughtlessness (of the kind with which we are all familiar) that Wolff describes?

My guess is that there is no such connection, but rather the reverse. Modern conservatives tend to see the locus of appropriate moral concern more in personal behavior than in social structure (I am not here concerned with whether they are right or wrong). They believe in personal responsibility rather than causation by abstract social forces. They do not believe in entitlement, their own or anyone else’s, or in an indefinite extension of rights. They do not believe in perfection, and they think that even improvement usually comes at a cost.

Modern liberals, by contrast, tend to focus their moral concern more distantly from themselves, on the more abstract political and economic sphere. For example, the personal sexual code does not concern or worry them much unless it is restrictive. They believe that bad behavior finds its origin in social forces rather than in man’s soul. They believe in everyone’s entitlements, which are never met quite sufficiently and need to be extended endlessly. For them, the perfect society will result in perfect people.

Which outlook is more conducive to good manners? It seems to me, a priori, the conservative rather than the liberal: for what can the daily personal conduct of a single man add to or subtract from the sum of human goodness or evil, happiness or misery?

Wolff himself supplies evidence in favor of my thesis. Acknowledging the meanness of what he is about to say, he writes, “When a tornado tears off a few roofs in Texas, I think, serves you right!” This reminded me of something I once heard from a man who organized international intellectual conferences in Amsterdam: the only people who ever complained to him about their lodgings were those who were most publicly concerned with social justice.

“That’s some of what the last seven years have done to this writer,” Wolff adds. So it’s not really his fault that he sees fit to express this ignoble thought to an audience of hundreds of thousands. It’s the last seven years that did it. If they had been fat instead of lean, he would have been sweetness and light, and would have taken the Texans to his heart.

Chris Horner has come out with another book about global warming. Red Hot Lies debunks the global warming myths that liars like Gore and James Hansen from NASA keep perpetuating. I am looking forward to reading it.

This story from Britain is quite easily the most disgusting one I've read in a long time, but one that is, unfortunately, not that rare. The murderers are profiled here.

The picture painted of [the mother] in court was of a woman who was at best uninterested in her baby.

Her own father said she spent much of her time lying on the sofa smoking and complaining about how tired she was....When she was awake, she spent much of her time on the internet, gossiping in chatrooms and playing online poker.

Her home was described as disgusting. When police searched it, they found dog mess and human faeces on the floor and rat holes burrowed into the walls. The bodies of dead chicks, mice and a dismembered rabbit were strewn around....The 32-year-old [boyfriend] was an unemployed handyman who could neither read nor write....Relatives said that as a child he tortured guinea pigs, once skinning one alive. He also snapped the legs off a frog....He spent a lot of time alone with Baby P, which is when much of the abuse took place.

He kept a Rottweiler dog at the family home and it was suggested in court that some of Baby P's injuries might have been inflicted by the animal.

He was also said to have shaken and punched the little boy, swinging him around by his legs and spinning him round on a chair until he fell off.

If he was ever confronted about his treatment of the baby, he claimed he was trying to "toughen him up". He even tried to train the boy like his dog. When he clicked his fingers, Baby P would touch his forehead to the floor for fear of being punished.

On the day the baby died, paramedics said they found the boyfriend standing in the hallway of the house, apparently unconcerned.

It's telling that such depraved evil can occur on a frequent basis in England. The world is in significant decline where the supposedly civilized West is more barbaric than Mogadishu. The mother didn't care that her son was being slowly tortured to death by her sociopathic boyfriend while the social workers were more concerned with perpetuating their horribly inefficient bureaucracy than helping the least of these. Of course, the proposed solution will undoubtedly be MORE social service bureaucracy. All of this is largely the fault of the liberal intelligentsia, who falsely claimed, as Melanie Phillips wrote this week, "that all lifestyles must be considered equal and that no one has right to pass judgment on anyone else." Ms. Phillips continues:

Government policy, egged on by activist judges who deliberately voided family law of ‘moral judgments’ on the basis that there was no right or wrong in family life because it was always just too complicated to untangle, accordingly penalised marriage, rewarded adultery, further incentivised lone parenthood and systematically normalised irregular relationships.

The outcome is a shattered social landscape of lost and abandoned children, raised in households of gross emotional chaos and physical and moral squalor. Such is the breakdown of the basics of civilised life that some of these children have never used a knife and fork by the time they enrol at school; their earliest words are obscenities, and aggression and violence are their instinctive response whenever they are thwarted.

Neglect is routine; love, responsibility and discipline wholly absent; under-age sex or sex with relatives or step-relatives commonplace; drug abuse, crime and systematic dishonesty a way of life. And these massively damaged children grow up into massively damaged parents....Those who warned of the individual harm and social catastrophe that would result were vilified as bigots. The only judgment to be permitted was that judgment of anyone’s lifestyle was wrong....Under this monumental pressure, academic research into family life was systematically corrupted to claim falsely that no serious harm was done to children from the fracturing of the family.

The truth about family life was deliberately concealed. Research shows a vastly greater risk of violence and abuse by boyfriends or stepfathers than biological parents or married spouses. A recent American study says a child is 50 times more likely to be abused by a non-biological parent.

In Britain, however, official statistics years ago stopped distinguishing between married and unmarried households, so it became impossible to identify the risks from unmarried relationships. Instead, ‘progressives’ claimed falsely that husbands and fathers posed the greatest risk to women and children.

Here in America, there is a tendency to believe that we're safe from the results of such radical postmodernism; "that could never happen here in the land of opportunity and Judeo-Christian values." Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

My Republican friends are now saying, oh, not to worry, look at the exit polls, this is still a "center-right" country. Americans didn't vote to go left, they voted to go cool. It was a "Dancing With The Stars" election: Obama's a star, and everyone wants to dance with him. It doesn't mean they're suddenly gung-ho for left-wingery.

Up to a point.

Unlike those excitable countries where the peasants overrun the presidential palace, settled democratic societies rarely vote to "go left." Yet oddly enough that's where they've all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter.

Even in America, federal spending (in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars) has gone from $600 billion in 1965 to $3 trillion today. The Heritage Foundation put it in a convenient graph: It's pretty much a straight line across four decades, up, up, up. Doesn't make any difference who controls Congress, who's in the White House. The government just grows and grows, remorselessly. Every two years, the voters walk out of their town halls and school gyms and tell the exit pollsters that three-quarters of them are "moderates" or "conservatives" (i.e, the center and the right) and barely 20 percent are "liberals." And then, regardless of how the vote went, big government just resumes its inexorable growth.

"The greatest dangers to liberty," wrote Justice Brandeis, "lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."

Now who does that remind you of?

Ha! Trick question! Never mind Obama, it's John McCain. He encroached on our liberties with the constitutional abomination of McCain-Feingold. Well-meaning but without understanding, he proposed that the federal government buy up all these junk mortgages so that people would be able to stay in "their" homes. And this is the "center-right" candidate? It's hard for Republicans to hammer Obama as a socialist when their own party's nationalizing the banks and its presidential nominee is denouncing the private sector for putting profits before patriotism. That's why Joe the Plumber struck a chord: He briefly turned a one-and-a-half party election back into a two-party choice again.

If you went back to the end of the 19th century and suggested to, say, William McKinley that one day Americans would find themselves choosing between a candidate promising to guarantee your mortgage and a candidate promising to give "tax cuts" to millions of people who pay no taxes he would scoff at you for concocting some patently absurd H.G. Wells dystopian fantasy. Yet it happened. Slowly, remorselessly, government metastasized to the point where it now seems entirely normal for Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Fla., to vote for Obama because "I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage."...I don't need Barack Obama's help to "spread the wealth around." I spread my wealth around every time I hire somebody, expand my business, or just go to the general store and buy a quart of milk and loaf of bread. As far as I know, only one bloated plutocrat declines to spread his wealth around, and that's Scrooge McDuck, whose principal activity in Disney cartoons was getting into his little bulldozer and plowing back and forth over a mountain of warehoused gold and silver coins. Don't know where he is these days. On the board at Halliburton, no doubt. But most of the beleaguered band of American capitalists do not warehouse their wealth in McDuck fashion. It's not a choice between hoarding and spreading, but a choice between who spreads it best: an individual free to make his own decisions about investment and spending, or Barney Frank. I don't find that a difficult question to answer. More to the point, put Barney & Co. in charge of the spreading, and there'll be a lot less to spread.

I disagree with my fellow conservatives who think the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Frank liberal behemoth will so obviously screw up that they'll be routed in two or four years' time. The president-elect's so-called "tax cut" will absolve 48 percent of Americans from paying any federal income tax at all, while those who are left will pay more. Just under half the population will be, as Daniel Henninger pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, on the dole.

By 2012, it will be more than half on the dole, and this will be an electorate where the majority of the electorate will be able to vote itself more lollipops from the minority of their compatriots still dumb enough to prioritize self-reliance, dynamism and innovation over the sedating cocoon of the Nanny State. That is the death of the American idea – which, after all, began as an economic argument: "No taxation without representation" is a great rallying cry. "No representation without taxation" has less mass appeal. For how do you tell an electorate living high off the entitlement hog that it's unsustainable, and you've got to give some of it back?

At that point, America might as well apply for honorary membership in the European Union. It will be a nation at odds with the spirit of its founding, and embarking on decline from which there are few escape routes. In 2012, the least we deserve is a choice between the collectivist assumptions of the Democrats, and a candidate who stands for individual liberty – for economic dynamism not the sclerotic "managed capitalism" of Germany; for the First Amendment, not Canadian-style government regulation of approved opinion; for self-reliance and the Second Amendment, not the security state in which Britons are second only to North Koreans in the number of times they're photographed by government cameras in the course of going about their daily business.

In Forbes last week, Claudia Rosett issued a stirring defense of individual liberty. That it should require a stirring defense at all is a melancholy reflection on this election season. Live free – or die from a thousand beguiling caresses of Nanny State sirens.

The end of political commercials for at least six months. I would favor a constitutional amendment to make their end permanent (or a stipend to all Americans so that they can buy their own DVRS so they can skip the commercials like I do).

The pro-traditional marriage amendment in California (and several other states) appears to have passed. This will ultimately protect the children in the public schools from state-mandated indoctrination.

Another pro-child law was passed in Arkansas which makes only married couples eligible for adoption or foster care. While I'm not sure I agree with the foster care part, that children will not be adopted by homosexuals or single parents is good news. Now Christians need to step up and fill that void and embody their convictions (as PB preached on Sunday).

Al Franken appears to have lost. Enough said.

The rest of the Hollywood celebrities can return to their addictions and debauched lifestyles and leave middle America in peace from their sanctimonious bloviating.

John McCain won't pull the Republican Party toward the Left on economic issues.

The Bad

While it will be nice to see them step back as a frothing mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, the mainstream media will go back to doing what it does best: making every personal tragedy an indictment of at least one Republican.

Anti-abortion propositions largely failed, including a parental notification law in California and an abortion ban (with rape and health exclusions, no less) in South Dakota. The latter is a grim indication where this country is at on this issue. Perhaps, as Dr. Moore said in his address last week, abortion is at the point of no return in this country on the legal end.

The vile Rep. Murtha won re-election in Pennsylvania (even after recently calling his constituents "racist" and "redneck").

7 million self-identified white, born-again Christians and 12 million black Protestants voted for the most pro-abortion candidate in history. This is a moral tragedy.

Republicans could mistakenly see this election as a message to them that they have to "go liberal" to get elected.

Michael Gerson from the Washington Post wrote this touching tribute to our current President (George W. Bush, that is):

Election Day 2008 must have been filled with rueful paradoxes for the sitting president. Iraq -- the issue that dominated George W. Bush's presidency for 5 1/2 bitter, controversial years -- is on the verge of a miraculous peace. And yet this accomplishment did little to revive Bush's political standing -- or to prevent his party from relegating him to a silent role....This seems to be Bush's current fate: Even success brings no praise....Initial failures in Iraq acted like a solar eclipse, blocking the light on every other achievement. But those achievements, with the eclipse finally passing, are considerable by the measure of any presidency. Because of the passage of Medicare Part D, nearly 10 million low-income seniors are receiving prescription drugs at little or no cost. No Child Left Behind education reform has helped raise the average reading scores of fourth-graders to their highest level in 15 years, and narrowed the achievement gap between white and African American children. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has helped provide treatment for more than 1.7 million people and compassionate care for at least 2.7 million orphans and vulnerable children. And the decision to pursue the surge in Iraq will be studied as a model of presidential leadership.

These achievements, it is true, have limited constituencies to praise them. Many conservatives view Medicare, education reform and foreign assistance as heresies. Many liberals refuse to concede Bush's humanity, much less his achievements.

But that humanity is precisely what I will remember. I have seen President Bush show more loyalty than he has been given, more generosity than he has received. I have seen his buoyancy under the weight of malice and his forgiveness of faithless friends. Again and again, I have seen the natural tug of his pride swiftly overcome by a deeper decency -- a decency that is privately engaging and publicly consequential.

Before the Group of Eight summit in 2005, the White House senior staff overwhelmingly opposed a new initiative to fight malaria in Africa for reasons of cost and ideology -- a measure designed to save hundreds of thousands of lives, mainly of children under 5. In the crucial policy meeting, one person supported it: the president of the United States, shutting off debate with a moral certitude that others have criticized. I saw how this moral framework led him to an immediate identification with the dying African child, the Chinese dissident, the Sudanese former slave, the Burmese women's advocate. It is one reason I will never be cynical about government -- or about President Bush.

For some, this image of Bush is so detached from their own conception that it must be rejected. That is, perhaps, understandable. But it means little to me. Because I have seen the decency of George W. Bush.